Historically, most mobile services were offered and provided by mobile operators. However, this situation is changing. Today, a growing number of mobile services are being offered by third-party application providers. Furthermore, this trend is expected to grow in the future and is expected to allow for much faster development time and a broader array of services.
Third-party service applications usually reside on the third-party servers which are outside of the operator's network. However, through contractual arrangements, they typically utilize some mobile services and functionalities offered by the operator's network.
Since operator network requirements are different and vary from operator to operator, third-party application developers/providers must currently maintain different specific versions of the same application—one for each operator. Obviously, maintaining operator specific versions greatly increases the expense of developing and supporting such applications, because many versions should be developed and maintained.
Typical examples of the specific functionalities from the operator network could be: interfaces to some mobile services (messaging, location, broadcasting, voice calls), authentication mechanisms, billing and charging interfaces. Interfaces to the mobile services provided by the operators network are usually essential for the application. Consequently, the application provider/developer must be thoroughly familiar with the semantics of each operator because the entire functionality of the application may depend on the application interface requirements. Thus, it is difficult to provide a uniform cross-operator solution for multiple operators because each application has to interact with different operator networks using different application interfaces for the similar mobile services provided by operators. Standards can ease this burden, but standard setting involves a long and complicated process.
Functionalities like authentication mechanisms, billing and charging system may be considered “common support functions”. They are usually not directly related to the mobile specifics of the application, but required for deployment of the services and for realization of business and security models. Usually these functionalities are somewhat orthogonal to the main functionality of a mobile application and are rather independent of the implementation of the core logic of the application.
Because the application interfaces and common support functions vary from operator to operator, the application provider/developer must maintain different versions of the application. Often the versions only differ in the interaction with the application interface and the “common support functions.”
What is needed, therefore, are systems and methods which allow operators to develop one application using generic parameters. The generic parameters may then be converted to operator specific parameters or requirements.